Please check existing answers before adding a new one!

Thank you so much for your interest in helping us find bugs in our dark mode version! The response to this has been amazing! My one request is that you look through existing answers before posting a new one. Nearly all of the newer answers I’ve gotten have been identified previously so the answers are duplicates!

For those of y’all waiting for fixes, we’re already working on many of them and you should start seeing status tags added to the answers soon. We appreciate your help and feedback!

As Aaron’s been working on building Stacks styles and he and the other developers have been gradually converting site elements to Stacks, Dark Mode was finally in reach for development. We've had Dark Mode in mind with our Stacks updates since July 2019 and started really focusing on it for the last two months.

Starting today Dark Mode is in beta for all logged-in users on Stack Overflow

It’s going to be a long road to complete this project but we felt that we were finally in a place where we could get your help finding all of the long tail bits we may have missed. For now, this is Stack Overflow in English only at this point - it doesn’t even work on MSO currently. The beta test will also be active on any Teams you may be on, so switching between the two shouldn’t cause blindness.

Thank you so much for your patience with us in getting this out. It’s been really neat to see the work some of y’all have done in creating userscripts to emulate dark mode here on SO and I hope you enjoy our version of it. I’ve been pestering Aaron with bugs for the last couple of weeks and I’m sure he’s going to love getting them from all of you!

Beta means some pages are out of scope

There are some parts of Stack Overflow that are currently opted out during the beta for various reasons. These include:

Homepage of Stack Overflow for non-logged in users

Jobs

Talent client portal

How to enable it:

To enable this, visit your Stack Overflow profile, go to the "Edit profile and settings" tab, scroll down to "Preferences" under "Site Settings" and find the "Theme" section at the top of the page. You have three options - light, dark and "system setting" which will adjust the theme based on what your system prefers.

(click the image to see a gif of the path)

How to give feedback:

Write an answer below. Be sure to give us the following information:

Description of the issue

Screenshot of the issue

Link to the page you’re seeing this problem

There are a couple of issues we’re already aware of that we’re working on but weren't able to clean up before release:

Badges

We still need to do an audit of our badges and see if we can simplify them a bit on our way to dark mode.

Various tabs

There are still some legacy filter tabs on a few pages that we need to convert to newer components.

Tables

Mostly impacts moderator (/admin) pages, though there are a couple on /tools pages.

Future releases

At this point, the focus of Dark Mode is on Stack Overflow and we’ll eventually bring it to MSO. While the retheming we did across the network two years ago makes updating our LESS easier, creating dark versions of all of our sites, particularly the custom-designed ones, is going to be a huge challenge we’re not able to contemplate at this time. The artwork on some of those sites simply can’t be made dark because we don’t have access to the original art files and, to be honest, some of the themes will always be better as-is.

If you have questions about dark mode on the network, please ask them on MSE rather than here.

In addition to bug reports, let me know if you have any questions or things I can clarify.

Thank you! Exciting to see such developments.
– deceze♦Mar 30 at 17:24

43

Nice, was expecting an April joke, but was offered something much better :)
– Christian GollhardtMar 30 at 17:43

14

Could this possibly be extended into chat.SO?
– NathanOliverMar 30 at 17:49

24

Not really a fan of dark mode, but it is extremely encouraging to see a feature that so many users in the community clamored for for so long. Well done!
– Travis JMar 30 at 18:36

12

This is great; thank you very much Catija, Aaron, and the rest of the team! Can't wait to see it make its way to Meta.
– TylerHMar 30 at 18:49

12

... OK... so... I'm not sure what y'all think about things... we're getting a handful of different kinds of answers below - some things are bugs with one bug per answer and others are huge digests of many bugs... some answers are FRs and some are a combo of bugs and FRs... some of the digests include individual answers. I usually prefer single answers but I'm wondering if it makes sense to have one big bug wiki answer and FRs as separate answers... or something else... thoughts?
– Catija♦Mar 30 at 19:01

3

YES!! Dark mode is 99% there. Biggest issue I see is syntax highlighting.If the color used is Saturated, then it will lack almost all contrast in dark mode. The same "color" can be used, but it needs to be de-saturated (using HSV values). The less saturation used, the more contrast with dark backgrounds there is (it doesn't effect light-mode to desaturate up to 50%+, but will make dark-mode readable) We know how much you try to stick to the international standard colors -- worth a check of the HSV values to see if they need tweaking for dark-mode.
– David C. RankinMar 30 at 21:57

12

It's almost perfect, but I'd like to see more lens-flares in the banner animation.
– alainMar 30 at 23:17

6

I was afraid this was an early April Fools joke due to the timing and the animated banner, and I'm so pleasantly surprised that it's real, and has been so lovingly crafted. This is a much tougher feature to implement in an established site. Thank you so much for taking the time to work on it! It looks great.
– Nicholas FlyntMar 31 at 0:53

5

Wow, impressive to see how many people are putting effort into reporting all the little dark mode fails.
– Steve BennettMar 31 at 2:54

I just came to meta (non-darkmode) from Darkmode main site, and I'm miserable now.
– Pac0Mar 31 at 15:52

16

I hope the feature of dark mode will be added in meta too. Well done, stack team!
– Mauricio Arias OlaveMar 31 at 17:42

4

The "ultra" dark is really cool for really late night work, but still a little "too" dark, especially if you lower your screen brightness to adapt to other windows.
– s.kApr 1 at 21:12

6

@HadiPawar I am guessing that the bug you’ve reported was already reported in one of the answers so it’s been downvoted because it’s a duplicate answer. I know it’s hard because there’s a ton of answers but it’s difficult for us to gauge what needs to be fixed if I have multiple answers saying the same thing. We love y’all for helping, we just need y’all to be thoughtful about checking existing answers before adding a new one.
– Catija♦Apr 6 at 13:05

@double-beep I just noticed. Feel free to edit the screenshot out into your own post :)
– ScratteMar 30 at 18:26

1

The double avatar situation is actually pretty complicated. We'd need to store all those images. We'd also have to figure out how to integrate with gravatar, and split the UI to upload an image for each context? Seems gnarly.
– Aaron Shekey♦May 11 at 19:39

@AaronShekey I find it absolutely awesome that I happened to find a great feature-request that seems so simple, but turns out to be unfeasible :) Thanks for looking into it :)
– ScratteMay 11 at 19:43

Technically, the grey dot means there's only a few tasks, not that they're empty. If they're empty, they don't have a dot at all. :) That said, your suggestion makes sense. Maybe a bit lighter but... :)
– Catija♦Mar 30 at 21:55

@Scratte Using colors rather than shading or greyscale vs single color (or other sorts of choices), they're not noticeably different to people who have colorblindness - particularly red vs green, which is the most common variety.
– Catija♦Mar 31 at 1:59

I appreciate this! I think that some of these have already been reported. Could you remove any that are already here? I know it's long and hard to look through but it's probably easier for you to do than me - for example, the last one you posted is the second-higest-scoring answer here. Thanks :D
– Catija♦Mar 31 at 3:27

If there is a duplicate issue present should I let this post be here or delete it?
– Rahul WadhwaniApr 2 at 10:10

I'm new here too so don't know either. The other post is mine so I don't want to be the one telling you that you should remove yours in favor of mine in case that is not the way to deal with things here.
– Alex TelonApr 2 at 10:44

I think I will just leave it as another example
– Rahul WadhwaniApr 2 at 18:59

This format for bug reports kinda sucks. Don't you have a regular bug base for this? (This format = everyone just post a bunch of answers to a question. Seems iffy and a dedicated search function would be handy too.)

The main text on the main page is bright white, 100%. (Well, it's rgb(231, 232, 235) according to FireFox, but it's still pretty bright.) I'd like to see something just a bit dimmer, like 40% or so. Usually dark themes like this have grayer text.

Ditto for links, like the titles of questions on the main page. They're bright blue (looks like the default blue), they could be a bit dimmer or darker.

User default icons have white backgrounds, these could be changed to something darker, like the background color of the theme (or transparent so the work for both?)

Once Dark Mode is selected, I'd like to see it on all my accounts, including this page (meta.stackoverflow.com) and all my stackexchange.com accounts. Yeah I know probably a lot more work.

#5 is explained in the OP: "For now, this is Stack Overflow in English only at this point - it doesn’t even work on MSO currently." It's a beta, relax :). Many of the other items in your list have already been mentioned in other answers. Please search for those an remove the duplicate entries.
– Heretic MonkeyApr 8 at 18:58

Similar to other message pop ups I've seen reported, the "Welcome back! If you found this question useful, don't forget to vote both the question and the answers up." message is has unreadable contrast.

Some of the HNQ icons are wrong, for example the Japanese Stack Exchange icon is rendered as the 3d printing meta icon. I'm using Firefox 75.0 on a Windows 10 system, and have reloaded the page with caches disabled. Other users report that the icons are correct in light mode.

This is super tricky, and I don't think Stack Overflow should be too opinionated here. This can be adjusted system-wide, and I think we should respect that. I think! For now. 😛
– Aaron Shekey♦May 11 at 20:00

It depends on the operative system and browser support. Also, in the screenshot you show you are not viewing the responsive version, but the "mobile" site. Scroll down to the bottom and click on "full site". Dark mode is not available on the mobile site, only in the responsive version.
– yiviMar 31 at 17:22

Thanks for the comments. Makes one wonder why there is a dedicated mobile site at all.
– Nico SchlömerMar 31 at 17:32

@NicoSchlömer I don't think it's actually that dedicated anymore. The design of SO for a while now has been moving more and more toward a responsive "one site for all devices" design.
– TylerHMar 31 at 17:43

"System default" does not detect GNOME theme, although as noted above, this is probably an issue with prefers-color-scheme and WebKit/Blink. I have "Adwaita-dark" set as Themes>Applications in GNOME Tweaks (as opposed to "Adwaita (default)"), but prefers-color-scheme is still "light", despite that Chrome is using dark color in title and bookmarks bar already.
– user5532169Apr 1 at 2:28

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

Seems a bit hard to see when editing an answer/question while in dark mode. And may make new users a bit confused if they are not used to the editing process...
I have added an image to help out.

My least favorite tag, but yeah, these are as intended. We might be able to drop that down a brightness level, but all the things like this use the same color, and we'd have to change it in every context. 🤔
– Aaron Shekey♦May 22 at 19:28

I would wait for this to be out of beta to start requesting new features.
– yiviMar 31 at 17:12

1

"wait for this to be out of beta" != "make a new question about it right now"
– John MontgomeryMar 31 at 17:18

1

And posting a separate question with this feature request at this stage would be premature, and correctly closed as a dupe since this Q&A would show you that the feature is still in beta and not yet ready for new feature requests. "Pathetic", "brainless"... I don't know why do you feel the need to resort to that language, but I would tone it down.
– yiviMar 31 at 17:18

@yivi I understand the "at this stage would be premature" but this is not a duplicate. Because the feature is still in beta, this is a duplication of the main post that is about finding bugs and low-contrast and un-converted bits? What? I think this feature would be a great addition to the site and I just want to post it so it's already on the table - exactly what a feature-request should be like. Things can be planned much better when potential features are known early.
– akuzminykhMar 31 at 17:38